Session 8 – Participatory Approach of Design

Participatory Design is an approach to the assessment, design and development of technological or organizational systems that concentrates a maximum attention on the active involvement of potential or current users of the project in design and decision-making processes. It regards every participant or user in a Participatory Design project as a stakeholder whose voice has a crucial importance and needs to be heard. It recognizes every worker and user as a prime source of innovation. Good and successful design ideas would arise in collaboration with participants from wide diverse backgrounds. Using the approach, our company has to adopt a system involving networks of people, practices and technology embedded in particular organizational contexts.
The main strengths within the organization are increasing the work control over the work content, measurement and reporting. Helping workers to communicate and organizing them across the hierarchical structure or with peers elsewhere will improve and create one better reflective and productive employee. Exactly giving the users the voice in the design process will increase the probability of a usable, original and profitable design. Actually, the developers, business representatives and users could work together trying to design a final business solution. The need of providing an opportunity for developers to meet, work and understand their users is common for the approach. Unlike other approaches to understanding users, participatory design assumes that users should play an active role in the creative process. The companies have to give huge efforts to understand people and their experience. Important is to take into account that all people are creative, all people have dreams, people project their needs onto ambiguous stimuli and people are making meaning trying to fill unsaid or unseen things.

There are clear and interesting advantages of this approach:
- It is affordable- the cost for user research is much cheaper than many large consulting and research firms
- It is extremely efficient- this method provides useful user data when it can do the most to improve designs. Before the design begins, during the fast prototyping or final validation, The Participatory Design could help in these well-known hard moments in every business process.
- There is a communication- the companies do thorough, deep and careful interviews and observe their own research.
- There is independence- in meaning of independent evaluations of ideas or work from outside users, developers or different background branches within the company.

Regarding the participatory design as an only search for creative users could rename it to Participatory Discovery. Concept where the users can design everything and the need of designer`s management thinking doesn`t exist anymore.

References: Blomberg and Kensing (1998), Gaffney (1999)